The Wonderful World of the Con

The Steampunk genre has been around for awhile, but it has definitely been picking up steam (No pun intended. Okay, maybe a little bit…) lately. This is could not be more evident than at the Cons. For those of you who don’t know what a Con is, the word is short for convention and that is exactly what it is. They happen all over the country at all times of the year and they have all sorts of different themes. Two of the biggest science fiction and fantasy conventions are Comic-Con, which happens in San Diego every summer, and DragonCon which is held every Labor Day weekend right here in Atlanta. Comic-Con is huge! About 125,000 people attended in 2009, and DragonCon is not far behind with over 50,000 freaks and geeks in attendance last year.
Science fiction and fantasy Cons are basically like giant four day costume parties. The two that I have attended for several years now are DragonCon and ChattaCon, which takes place in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They are held in hotels, (in the case of DragonCon, several hotels) and there are a list of scheduled events, and a multitude of things to see and do. Things like costume contests, concerts, workshops, gaming events, autograph signing, art shows, dealer rooms (where vendors set up booths and people can buy all sorts of stuff), and of course room parties.
The reason I am giving you the run down on the convention world is so that you will understand when I say that in the way of costuming, Steampunk has taken over. Everyone has been wearing Steampunk costumes for the past couple of years. The new thing is to make a bigger, better, more creative, or more elaborate Steampunk costume. Here are a few examples of some of my friends costumes form DragonCon ’09 and ChattaCon '10

These are a couple of my friends in their winter Steampunk outfits. They did not buy these pieces, they handmade their entire outfits!!


This is my friend Derrick. He decided to go a different route with his costume. He calls this his "Evil Dictator Costume".



I don't know this guy, but his costume was one of the most creative that I have seen. He actually made his electric wheelchair part of his outfit. All of the tubes and pieces on the back either light up, make noise, or wind like gears. It was really awesome! You can see that his friend standing beside him is dressed in Steampunk as well.

These are just a few examples of some costumes that I have seen. Now you have a bit of an idea of the style of dress associated with the genre, as well as an idea of the wide range of creative liberty there is when it comes to Steampunk. The possibilities are endless!!

Welcome!!

This blog is being created to express everything I know and will know through my findings about my latest obsession: SteamPunk. SteamPunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that is super awesome and that I am having great fun reading and learning about. Since I have been having such a good time with it I have decided to share what I know with all of you, you being anyone who is interested in this subject as well, or interested in finding out what people are talking about when they say SteamPunk. Because believe me people are talking about it, you just might not have heard about it yet. But never fear, thanks to me you are about to be in the know. SteamPunk is everywhere now, and when I say everywhere I mean literature, art, film, animation, fashion, and pretty much any other area you can think of, and in each of my posts I will be addressing another way in which the SteamPunk phenomenon is permeating the edges of pop culture. So tune in, because believe me it is going to be fun.

SteamPunk: An Overview

The SteamPunk genre stems originally from futuristic literature by authors like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. The Time Machine being one of the more well known pieces is a very fun, short read. It is more like a novella than anything else, and you could probably read it in fairly short amount of time even if you are not an avid reader like I am. I am sure many of you are familiar with at least one film adapataion of the book, there have been a few, the most recent being released in 2002 starring Guy Pierce and Samantha Mumba. This is a good example of the Neo-Victorian style of the SteamPunk genre. All the clothes are of the Victorian England age: tailored jackets, high-waisted skirts, bowler hats, you get the picture. The whole idea is that the stories are placed in this Victorian time period but there are many technological advances in use that did not come along till about a hundred years later (like computer systems) or that have still not been invented to this day (like time machines). One of the major aspects of the whole idea, and where the genre gets its name, is that all of these nifty inventions are run on steam powered electricity rather than the way these things work in the world we know today. Hence the whole fiction part of it. This is what is called speculative fiction, or fiction that is based on some sort of alternate reality.

So, ladies and gentlemen, and future fellow SteamPunk fans, this concludes my brief introduction to the fascinating and oh so fun world of SteamPunk. Tune in next time for another installment of your soon to be extended knowledge of StemPunk!